Head of Passes

Alana Arenas and Phylicia Rashad in Head of Passes, Photo credit: Joan Marcus.

HEAD OF PASSES at the Public Theater is not a new play, and Tarell Alvin McCraney is not a novice playwright. This production is a collaboration with The Berkeley Repertory Theatre where it was mounted in the spring of 2015. Previously, it debuted at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in 2013. In all these iterations, Tina Landau, a frequent collaborator of Mr. McCraney’s (and no novice herself) has been at the helm as director. The play has been taken to task by reviewers in both Chicago and California for structural issues. But if you love the game, there are reasons you go, even if it doesn’t look like your team’s gonna win this particular series. You sit it out until the last out at the bottom of the 9th, hoping against hope that the team will pull off a miracle that seems more distant with each passing moment.

The setting is Head of Passes, Louisiana in “the distant present” where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico,. And where the sea has been taking back the coastline for over a century. In a leaky house clearly destined for doom, Shelah (Phylicia Rashad), the matriarch of a fractured family, is ill and trying to hide it to bring her children back together. She’s an intensely devout woman, but there’s a storm raging outside that we can tell bears no good will from above. Act one is a fairly standard kitchen sink drama. We are introduced to the main characters; Shelah, her eldest son Aubrey (Francois Battiste, who also played the role in Berkeley), who is a confident, brash, domineering type has organized a surprise birthday party for his mother. Then there’s Spencer (J. Bernard Calloway), the underachieving younger son who can never do anything right, and Cookie (Alana Arenas, who created the role at Steppenwolf) the adopted daughter Shelah loves like her own, but who is a junkie and has become estranged from them.

Unfortunately, during the first act there are as many extra characters as there are family members. There’s a lot of buzz, chatter and exposition about who everyone is, and some fine comic moments. But it’s all a distraction from the family and what they feel. And how it got to be that way. Ultimately we get so involved trying to figure out who these extraneous people are and how they relate to the family that we never come to care for the family. I can’t fault the actors here. They get the most out of what they’re given. Phylicia Rashad does her best with a character we struggle to understand. We figure out that she’s sick and that her late husband was not a nice man. He pawned off his daughter by another woman, Cookie, on Shelah to raise. Which she says she did with love and acceptance. But we don’t really know how she felt about her life or her husband in those days. Or any day. Every time we think we are going to, some minor character interrupts. The only time we’re really moved in the first act, and that we learn about the inner life of the family in a meaningful way, is when Cookie (Alana Arenas) shows up. Alana Arenas does an outstanding job as Cookie, because mercifully, Mr. McCraney has done the character justice in the script. We feel and understand Cookie’s pain, desire, frustration and determination to keep her sons out of the family home. Despite Cookie’s addiction, her vulnerability and the reasons behind it endear her to us. If only we had that glimpse into Shelah, Aubrey and Spencer.

In the second act, when Shelah becomes a parable for Job and everything in her life is lost, the play morphs into another style entirely – magical realism – as she bargains and barters with God. This is where the big questions get asked by the playwright and the audience is rewarded for sitting through the first act. Most of the second act is a powerful, tour de force monologue by Shelah. It’s unfair that we aren’t weeping at the end of it, but that’s not her fault. Ms. Rashad has laid it all out and left it on the stage. Unfortunately, the play hasn’t set us up to care enough to cry. It’s three strikes for this play, coach. Let’s put it to rest and concentrate on the upcoming season. You’ve got a fine team and we know you can hit it out of the park next time.

Head of Passes – Written by Tarell Alvin McCraney, Directed by Tina Landau

About The Author

Donna Herman is a native New Yorker and a self-confessed theater addict. It all started in her childhood, which was spent on movie and television sets and in dark empty theaters while her mother, an actress, and her father, a make-up artist and playwright/screenwriter, worked. She knew she wanted to be an actress at 4 years old while on location with her father who was working on the movie “West Side Story.” They were filming the “Officer Krupke” number on the street and Donna was inside the police barricades being helpful and pressing the lever on the coffee urn for the crew. Meanwhile, the kids from the neighborhood were pressed against the sawhorses looking in. She knew then she always wanted to be on the inside. But it wasn’t until her 8th birthday when she saw her first Broadway show, “My Fair Lady,” that she fell prey to her addiction.
Donna went on to act throughout her school career and attended Boston University’s School of Fine Arts Theater Program where she studied Acting and Directing. After graduation, she returned to NYC and began the life of a struggling actress. She was fortunate enough to originate the role of Chang in John Jesurun’s downtown cult serial classic play “Chang In A Void Moon” which performed a new episode at The Pyramid Club on Avenue A every Monday night for almost a year in the 80’s. Many downtown notables were in the cast including Steve Buscemi, Black-Eyed Susan, David Cale, Greg Mehrten, and Anna Kohler.
While pursuing acting, Donna made money by working in recording studios and eventually got hired full time to manage Spyro Gyra’s new recording studio when Julian Lennon was recording his first album there. From there she became the Production Coordinator on the film of his concert tour for his production company. This led her to a job with the award winning audio post production facility where she stayed for 12 years and was the Controller. From there she went to Charlex, Inc. an award winning special effects and design company for the advertising industry, where she was the CFO and stayed for 17 years.
But her love for the theater has never waned and living in New York, she has always been able to indulge it. She has even been called to revise her role as Chang occasionally over the years, the latest for episodes 59 to 61 in 2015. She is now looking to get back to a more creative life and reviewing theater and designing jewelry.